To Do: End of Summer Blow Out with The Girls’ Guide to Rocking

August 21, 2009

The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, the new super-primer/covert punk-rock educator/best friend of a book by SOTC buddy Jessica Hopper, is actually a lot of books at once. It’s a polemic (girls should rock), a how-to with a sneaky DIY slant (girls should do it themselves), and a covert good-taste record guide (a single parenthetical in TGGTR checks Pavement, CAN, No Age and, mind-bogglingly, Xasthur). “I made this book for you so that you don’t have to take the word of the two dudes on the JV Bowling team who sit next to you in Health class,” writes Hopper in the book’s introduction. Indeed–this is the kind of advice, it turns out, we all could’ve used back then, and had my sister had this book when I was young, I probably would’ve stolen it from her.

Hopper’s book tour touches down in NYC tomorrow, when she and a gang of affiliates–the Nico/Julz Sale-synthesizing songstress Katie Stelmanis (she did vocals on Fucked Up’s “Royal Swan”), local pigfuck acolytes These Are Powers, DJs MNDR, and the twin sister duo The Ghost Bees–do an end-of-summer blowout at Brooklyn’s Littlefield. In an elegant bit of theory/practice, everyone will eat BBQ, Hopper will read from the book, and then the bands will go ahead and provide an illustration of the general idea as it plays out on Saturday night in cities around the world. Further info, and tickets, can be found here. The show is regrettably not all ages (16+), so if you have a spare ID lying around, pass it to your favorite 15-year-old aspiring punk rocker. In an essentially adult-to-adult non-creepy way, of course.